Designer - SUPER BAD performance in designer as soon as I use some kind of pattern

[JuanGea]

Hi there.

 

I´m drawing some commercial planes for an architecture firm, and I´m suffering a super bad performance, my computer is a big one, a 5960X, 64Gb of RAM, SSD´s and a GTX1080.

But as soon as I have a few shapes in my document, designer becomes super sluggish, doing practically anything is super problematic, check an example of the kind of project I´m doing as an attached image, I can´t show the full plane, but you get the idea of the kind of project it is.

How can I improve performance in this situation? It´s pretty bad working at that low speed.

Thanks.

[firstdefence]

How large is your document?

How are you applying the pattern, are you using the Fill Tool and then choosing Bitmap fill? this requires you to make patterns and export them first as PNG files etc.

By the way, Affinity's primary source of power is the CPU

[JuanGea]

Hi @firstdefence

No my patterns are vectors, I need them as vectors because I need to export this in different resolutions, I cannot use a bitmap pattern. They are drawings inside a layer that cover an specific zone and I mask that layer, for example the wood floor or the terrace floor.

Yeah, regarding the CPU, that is why I posted my CPU, a 5960X, 8 cores 16 threads at 4,2Ghz, pretty powerful computer, that is why I think it´s strange this performance.

One file of this project weigths around 25Mb the smallest one and 40Mb the biggest one.

Cheers!

[firstdefence]

I wonder if one of the mods like @stokerg could take a look at the file, they have a dropbox that you can upload to privately, this is good for commercial works.

[JuanGea]

That could be awesome

[SrPx]

There's a user around here that makes extremely complex scenes in designer, many nodes. He might give you some hints.... I think the nick is Hokusai... 

And uploading a file that gives you issues (one that wont have copyright/NDA issues, just whatever with the amount of random nodes where you start seeing issues with it) so we can see if we can replicate it in our machines. If it doesn't in mine, then there's sth going on as one can't go lower than my machine...

Nope, can't be due to the CPU.

Edit: A video of the sluggishness  captured is a lot of help also, often (it throws many clues).

 

[JuanGea]

Thanks SrPx, I´ll do a video, I can´t share the document, and I´m on a tight deadline, so I cannot replicate the problem in a free document, but I´ll try to record a video hiding the parts I must hide.

I can upload the file privately to them, but that´s it I´m afraid.

Thanks!

[JuanGea]

After upgrading to 1.6.5 (the latest one) the performance is a bit better than before, not espectacular yet, but at least it is not super slow, that´s a good sign

[SrPx]

Perfectly so. Actually, if you had seen the designs from Hoku (sorry , I keep not being able to remember the exact nick), you would realize here is something going on: I am almost positive his machine is not as good as yours ( maybe it is !), mostly as a beast like that is not common around here (not sure why, maybe few gamers, but is not only the card what is high end (mainstream highend, let's call it, but I ended preferring these to Quadros, despite the latter being better with the wires)  it's the ram, and the cpu is very powerful, and yet the amount of nodes in all his designs is literally crazy.

It could be adding more groups, a conflicting font bottle-necking everything, a layer causing some conflict, or too many layers, or something. Not long ago someone with much better machine than me had bad performance issues in Designer, but same file flied in my machine. I can't remember, but I believe was one of those things that gets hunted by the community or the staff. Reason why uploading a vid, a file, screens or all of it, is tremendously useful to solve it, as there is a collection of possibilities. But I understand schedules ! I do, like few people! If you can upload for them that private file, that'd rock, certainly. Besides, any issue hunted benefits the whole project (Affinity) , is a step more to improving it.   And it is really worth it...

 

[firstdefence]

4 hours ago, SrPx said:

Hoku (sorry , I keep not being able to remember the exact nick)

There is a @hoku and a @Hokusai

You can view people Online: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/online/ and filter by Moderator if you want to directly ask them to help.

[Hokusai]

firstdefence,

I'm not sure if SrPx is talking about me or not? I do have some very node heavy illustrators, one with around 70,000 objects. I did my version of Don Quixote on an old iMac with only 4 gigs of RAM and I didn't have any problems at all. Here is the link: 

 

[SrPx]

Yep, it was exactly you, sorry.... besides my terrible memory ( can't do much better with one lonely neuron in all that empty space )  is surely the fact that there are two nicks that one looks like an abbreviation of the other, and I was not sure if my random memory had done the abbreviation by its own initiative. Apologies for the confusion.

But yeah, the wires you showed from those files are the best demonstration of how far A. Designer can go in terms of performance. So is why I suspect there's sth else going on here. Like those times when it was a conflicting font, some issue with certain groups, or etc.

 

[Hokusai]

SrPx,

No worries, I wasn't sure it was me you were referring to but it sounded like me. I have made some files with some heavy amounts of lines, objects, and nodes but I've never had any kind of a slowdown like the original poster is talking about (and my machine is nothing special in fact it is at the bottom of the list of machines that can run Designer). 

I have no idea what could be causing the slowdown but like @firstdefence said, a developer might be able to figure it out if they looked at the file.

Hokusai

[John Rostron]

@JuanGea, have you tried running the Task Manager at the same time as AD?  It will tell you CPU usage and memory pressure as you work.

John 

[gdenby]

Hi, JuanGea,

I looked at my pure vector files. I have some w what seems a lot to me, 17K+ objects, but none were near the file size you mention by an order of magnitude. 

So I generated a file w. 1.5M+ rectangles, with several clipping layers. Those were half the size of your smallest file. At that size, my machine, see sig below, could not redraw the vectors w/o seconds of lag. It was not as bad as much smaller files w. lots of fx, but the display did stutter.

I s'pose you might need to come up w. a visual short hand for the expanses of floor boards and tiles, rather like what would have been done when using pen and ink. Put in a little panel showing the shorthand representation w. a small sample of the complete representation.  In other words, 8 squares placed irregularly instead of 64.  Floor boards, a couple of dashed lines

[firstdefence]

On 9/11/2018 at 9:49 AM, JuanGea said:

One file of this project weigths around 25Mb the smallest one and 40Mb the biggest one.

Just for curiosities sake What are the settings and dimensions of these files?